Amid the tiny din of two-hundred micturating rodents, Ralph X. Bumblefutz goggled in disbelief at a discovery that would forever lay waste to the West’s most cherished ideas about incontinence. It was a clear Autumn morning in 1974, in a cluttered basement laboratory occupying a disused corner of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, and pants would never be the same. But before we can come to terms with Bumblefutz and his paradigm-exploding diapered hamsters, we must travel in time to 14th-century Tuscany and confront the mystery of a beloved Dominican friar hanged to death for frock-soiling. …O God! What hath Gladwell wrought?! Plenty of “ideas non-fiction” editors think this hype is what readers want. And maybe they do want this. Maybe editors know readers. But not this one. No, not me. I swear to sweet Moses I’m sick unto death of the anecdote-choked, aha!-hunting ,“What the New Science of Blah Tells Us about Blech,” book-length collection of pop-sci features articles.
Zing!: What the New Science of the New Sciences Tells Us About Our Unquenchable Craving for the Illusion of Scientifically-Validated Insight | The Moral Sciences Club | Big Think. Will Wilkinson, you are so, so right. May this plague pass soon.